Intelligence in War by Keegan John

Author:Keegan, John [Keegan, John]
Language: zho
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2003-10-27T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Midway: The Complete Intelligence Victory?

THE DEFEAT of Admiral Von Spee’s East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron in 1914 laid the basis for Japan’s conquest of the oceanic perimeter of its Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere in 1941–42, for the island colonies that von Spee abandoned in his retreat from the Pacific were instantly occupied by Japanese naval expeditionary forces. Japan entered the First World War as an ally of Great Britain, in answer to a request for naval assistance in hunting down German armed merchantmen. Japan’s motive in responding to the British request was not, however, one of diplomatic goodwill but strict self-interest. Ever since its re-entry into the world in 1854, after centuries of self-imposed sequestration, and particularly since its creation of a modern army and navy in the century’s last decades, Japan had sought to become a major Pacific power. Its long-term ambition was to dominate China, but its ruling class recognised that the established great powers, particularly Britain and Russia, which had their own designs on China, would check any attempt at large-scale annexation. The policy of the United States was an even more important obstacle, since it was benevolent and largely disinterested. While commercial America sought to create and protect markets in China, political and missionary America hoped to make the country democratic and Christian. Since America was a great Pacific power, its attitude was a major factor in determining Japan’s strategic policy. By 1908 the Japanese navy was considering the problem of fighting the United States navy in Pacific waters; by 1910 it was studying the question of attacking the Philippines, over which the United States had extended a protectorate at the end of the Spanish–American War of 1898.1

The Japanese navy recognised that to conduct a naval war against the United States in the Pacific, even as a theoretical exercise, required bases beyond the home islands. By 1914 Japan had already considerably extended its territorial reach. As a result of its victory in the war against China in 1894–95 it had acquired the great offshore island of Formosa (Taiwan) and the nearby archipelago of the Pescadores; it had established an effective protectorate over Korea, which became a Japanese colony in 1910, and secured concessions in the Liaotung Peninsula, the strategic promontory enclosing the Yellow Sea; it had also extracted a “lease” over the productive province of Kwantung. The great powers, wanting for themselves the territory Japan had won, intervened after the China War, forcing it to disgorge the Liaotung Peninsula, in which Britain, Germany and Russia set up their own maritime enclaves, the Russians at the anchorage of Port Arthur.

Japan took its revenge in 1904, opening a war against Russia which resulted in major victories in Manchuria and the destruction of most of Russia’s naval power. It had, however, learnt a lesson: that the white imperialists—then including the Americans, temporarily in an imperialist phase—would not allow an Asian state to acquire colonial possessions desired, actually or potentially, by themselves.

Germany’s abandonment of its Pacific colonies and Britain’s

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